Get involved with the archive

Tell a friend

The document collection has spent over 35 years in filing cabinets. How many man-hours of reverse-engineering has been spent to figure out specs that are just sitting in these pages? If anyone needs this info, we’d like them to know it’s here—so techs and musicians can put down the test equipment and start thinking, creating, and coming up with new ideas for this old technology.

So, if you know someone who might be interested in the archive, please tell them!

Volunteer

Scanning a page is just one (very important) part of digitizing an archive. Ideally, we would also have a thorough catalog of what is contained in the pages, so we can quickly find information in the scans.

We are maintaining a spreadsheet that lists each document by part number, its title, and the instruments or assemblies that the part number belongs to. This is a time-consuming, but essential, part of maintaining the archive. We would love to include additional detail in the spreadsheet, but we can only add it if time allows.

Another reason to have a spreadsheet is so that it can be the foundation for a database that can be used to design a more sophisticated website. In this version of the website, each image would have a tag, and the user would be able to sort scans by tag. The tags can be for the type of keyboard, the type of part, the people who signed off on the blueprint, the date the blueprint was made, and more. The documents have a lot of information to offer, and creating a database would make it easier for researchers to focus on whatever aspect of the collection is most interesting to them.

If you would like to help organize the data in the documents, please get in touch with us here or contact us via the form. Volunteer positions are remote and can be done from anywhere.

Write for us

The documents in this collection show organs, electronic pianos, drum machines, electronic components, early digital consumer devices, and more. They are a snapshot of American industry and corporate history. There is a lot to learn and study in these documents.

If you have any insights into anything found in the documents—the people, places, things, practices, materials, etc—and would like to volunteer to write an article or even just a blurb, please get in touch with us. Articles help make the documents discoverable, and the context helps people appreciate and learn from the documents, even if they aren’t experts in the subject matter. Contact us here or using the form on this page.

Donate your documents

With 100,000 documents, we must have enough, right? …of course not!!

We were able to save this collection through pure luck. We found the documents in a warehouse owned by a former employee of the Wurlitzer Co. When we learned that this warehouse was sold, we realized that the collection of Wurlitzer parts inside was at risk. But we didn’t know exactly what was inside, and we couldn’t get in touch with either the old or the new owners of the warehouse. (We tell the whole story here.)

It was by pure chance that someone associated with the warehouse emailed us, and it was pretty lucky that we had the ability to drop everything we were doing and drive 17 hours to rural Mississippi to look at a warehouse that we were told contained basically nothing of interest. Then we found the documents, and through a whole series of slapstick obstacles that are pretty funny in retrospect but were extremely serious at the time (no hotel rooms within 2 hours of the warehouse; can’t rent a truck for love or money; etc.), we managed to get them back to New York.

We know there must be other very cool collections of papers out there that are essential to the history of music and technology, and we don’t want them to get lost. Back in 2022, we learned a lot about the logistics of rescuing 2,000 lbs of paper, and we are more than happy to help find a home for other archives—either with us, or with the right people who will appreciate them. Please contact us here or fill out the form to get the process started.